Healthcare

Digital health is an area rampant with competition, winners, losers and promise. With that brings heavy interest in watching funding activities given the startup environment, as well as over time how those companies move to the next phase of lifecycle. According to StartUp Health, Digital Health funding has reached record levels of $3.9 Billion in the first half of 2016.

Over the several weeks we will disclose 5 deals which are particularly interesting as part of digital healthcare and the ever changing vendor ecosystem. Each were chosen as part of the trend of cross industry exploration of opportunities in digital health, where acquisitions are expected to be increasingly leveraged as firms strive to take advantage of the growth opportunities in healthcare, or continue to evolve their portfolios in the market.

This deal showcases that the large brand consumer company acquisitions into the digital health market are even extending into the animal health segment as part of portfolio acquisitions, and ties to the same important trend observed with other deals, more human related, including Fossil-Misfit; Nokia-Withings; and Under Armour-MyFitnessPal.

We expect continued startup activity in pet wearables as part of trying to capture part of high consumer spending on our beloved pets. It is still probably a challenging area to widely scale so will be interesting to see what a company like Mars can do here.